FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

Donald Trump: A U.S. President Unbound

June 18, 2018(EIRNS)—” ’There’s no stopping him,” from meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a senior Administration official familiar with the internal deliberations on a Trump-Putin meeting told the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser, who reported that statement in her June 15 article: “He’s going to do it. He wants to have a meeting with Putin, so he’s going to have a meeting with Putin.”

Following the meeting with North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un, President Trump is dismissing advisors’ warnings about the political dangers of such a meeting, given the Special Counsel’s investigations of Russian influence. Trump, Glasser reports, “jubilantly” declared his meeting with Kim Jong-un to be a “historic” encounter that will lead to the end of the North Korean nuclear weapons program.

“Now Russia experts inside and outside the U.S. government are bracing themselves for a formal announcement of the summit, which is likely to happen as early as July, when Trump will be in Europe for the annual meeting of the NATO alliance,”

Glasser writes.

Negotiations got serious after Trump ignored his aides’ “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” all-capitals warning in his post-Russian election phone call with Putin in March. Trump invited Putin to the White House, but Glasser reports that Putin didn’t want to come to Washington, preferring to meet in a third-party location. So, Putin asked Austria’s new Chancellor Sebastian Kurz to arrange the summit for Vienna, which the White House is considering. Trump has ordered his staff to plan the Putin summit soon, perhaps as soon as Trump’s July trip to Europe for the NATO summit.

“Trump’s pursuit of a one-on-one with Putin mirrors his spur-of-the-moment decision to meet with the North Korean leader; a major policy move carried out in spite of his advisors, not because of them, and with little genuine support from either Republicans or Democrats,”

Glasser reports.

“Trump ... has increasingly acted like a President unbound, undeterred by the troublesome politics that would make a Putin summit unimaginable at this point in any other Presidency.”